Clang, Clang, Clang, Clang

I have a outdoor "wind" bell that I love.

I found the bell one year when Raymond and I were vacationing at my parents' house. It was at a little shop on the square and I loved how it looked. We had not been in this house very long and I thought it would be a great addition to hang in my breezeway (another word for constant wind tunnel). After deciding that it cost too much, I left it hanging in the store. Raymond and I talked about the bell all evening, and I told him I hoped it would be there our next visit as we were leaving in the morning before the shop would open. My parents heard us talking about the bell and the next thing I knew arrangements were made for my parents to go get the bell and ship it to us. I was so excited when it arrived in the mail. I went right out and hung it up.

The bell did not ring all day. I figured it was so heavy that I would only hear it when I rang it myself, but it didn't matter because I loved how it looked with its beautiful patina and the copper foil clapper.

That night as we were sleeping the sound of a train clanging very nearby caused me to shoot up in bed. I remember thinking how odd to hear a train clanging so close. I had never heard a train from this house before except for when I was outside, and even then it was very faint. Why was this one barreling through my bedroom? I sat in bed and listened. I did not hear anything else, so I went back to sleep. I might have been asleep for about fifteen minutes when the train sounded again, this time waking Raymond. I asked him why we could hear a train and he informed me that it was not a train, it was the new bell. Well, I knew that couldn't be good since the bell was hung at the opposite side of the house from the bedrooms. If I could hear it in my bedroom, what were the neighbors hearing since their bedrooms were on the side of their house closest to the bell. Even with 250 feet between the houses, I figured they could probably hear the repeated clangs of my beautiful bell now that the wind was picking up. After a brief discussion, we decided to worry about it in the morning and went back to sleep without incident.

The next morning I decided to leave the bell up because I thought it might have been a fluke of the wind direction that kept me from getting sleep the night before. However, that thought turned out to be untrue as I had yet another night of little sleep and lots of clanging. I could not understand why the bell clanged at night and not during the day. The good news was the neighbors said they had not heard the bell at all.

After several night time incidents, I finally took my bell down and put it in the closet until I could decide its place. I tried to hang it several times after that, but it would still clang too much, so with great sadness I retired the bell to a hook in our foyer. When we had the house remodeled to make it handicapped accessible, I wrapped the bell in tissue paper and placed it in a closet.

Several years passed and I decided that I wanted to get my bell out of the closet and hang outside again. I also wanted to hang some wind chimes I had inherited along with some I had been given. Raymond did not mind the wind chimes, but he still hated the bell, but I wanted the bell up. One day when Raymond was gone I decided to hang the bell far inside a tree where he couldn't see it. It would only ring when the wind was wild. It took a few days, but sure enough Raymond was sitting outside and heard the bell. He looked, but could not find the bell until one of the boys located it for him. It soon became a game between us with me hiding the bell and him wanting to know where it was located. Both boys soon became involved and it got to be a little joke between all of us.

A couple of years ago I moved the bell closer to the house in a pine tree off the patio. You can see it, but seldom hear it clanging. Even when the wind is chiming all the other wind chimes I have throughout the yard and breezeway, the bell is almost always silent. The silence of the bell does not bother me because I know it is there reminding me of inside jokes, a long ago vacation, and love.

I came home the other day from a day out with the boys. It had not been a bad day, but I was feeling a little beaten down and low. As I was walking up the ramp to the door, I heard my bell. It clanged four times. That was all. In a quiet yard, with no noticeable wind and no other wind chime sounding my bell had clanged, loud clear, and beautiful. I stopped, turned around, looked to the sky and said "I love you too, honey."

I always knew that bell was special.